Wall Hangings and Carpets

Gunta Stölzl - excerpt from "The Development of the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop", 1931, discussing the Weimar years.

"Weaving is an old craft which has evolved principles upon which even the mechnical loom must still build today. A high degree of handcraft, dexterity, skill and understanding must be acquired, and these are not, as in the case of tapestry, to be nourished by imaginative power or artistic feeling. The coming of grips with the flat loom, as its natural result, the limitation of materials, the restriction of colour, the tying of the form to the weaving process.

The use of a material on the other hand, limits and determines the choice of the elements. Conclusions about function are always dependent on the conception of life and the living. In 1922-23 we had an idea of living fundamentally different from that today. Our ideas could then still be poems fraught with ideas, flowery decoration, personal experience! They also quickly met with approval outside the walls of the Bauhaus with the public at large. They were the most easily understood and, thanks to their subject matter, the most ingratiating of those wildly revolutionary Bauhaus creations "